CLOSING REMARKS ON ETHICS
Contents:
To have life as the standard of value is not to pursue survival at any cost. As volitional beings, the value for our life is contextual, i.e. it is based on the grasp of reality as it is (the actual) and as it could be (the potential). The value for life is absolute, but such a value for a volitional being stems not from life’s longevity as such but from the primary potential of his life as he grasps it.
Death in a life-affirming viewpoint…
To your own existence, your non-existence is simply a non-value, i.e. it has no importance by itself in the standard of value. Moreover, the fact of your non-existence can be of no concern to you for the reason that non-existence erases you and your very experience of existence itself (hence, your self and your death are mutually exclusive). Given that your life (as defined for a volitional being) is your standard of value, then to you, life is the goal of every goal and death by itself is of no importance.
NOTE: The possibility of death is important only insofar as it relates to the diminishing of life and its potential.
Survive not to avoid death but to live. Death by itself is meaningless to someone concerned with living, while life lived to the fullest is all that matters.
To make a value of something that is impossible to achieve is to act for nothing ultimately. To knowingly act so is to knowingly subvert the pursuit of one’s own life. Thus, moral perfection can be defined only in terms of what is possible (possible to an individual in particular, drawing on his nature as a volitional being and the particulars by which his nature is expressed).
The source of the concepts of “good” and “evil” is the faculty of volition, since it is only a volitional being that needs a standard of value to orient his conscious actions. To say a being is good or evil by its nature is to ascribe volition to the non-volitional aspects of the being, a fallacy that destroys (1) the concept of a standard of value, (2) the concepts of good and evil, and (3) the mechanisms that help guide volition (ex. guilt (both unearned guilt and shamelessness are its corruption), self-worth (both humility and vanity are its corruption), etc.)
No being is good or evil by nature, neither a non-volitional being nor a volitional one. That which is inherent or automatic, including drives, impulses, desires, even non-purposive thoughts cannot qualify anyone as good or evil by themselves; they are facts that must be accepted without moral judgement (though other kinds of judgement can be relevant). It is only what a volitional being chooses to do and to make with what he has that can be judged morally.
The world is, in fact, not unknowable but simply unknown in large parts. We know something but not everything and must act accordingly. In the face of the unknown, it is rational to explore and expand knowledge to gain a stronger grasp of the reality we must deal with. Hence, it is rational to risk (i.e. act with uncertainty) if and when (1) it is certain that not doing so leads to a loss of value and a loss for the worth of life as such and/or (2) it is certain that the path that has a risk also has greater potential for value (as a whole) than any other path.
If something is necessary (i.e. the only practical choice), then it must be good — the moral is the practical. If not, then we evaluate that which is necessary as “evil”, which means the standard for practical action is separated from the standard for moral action, making morality an ineffective, impractical or even impracticable guide to action and thus subverting the purpose of morality.
The choice offered by such a subverted morality is “goodness” vs. “life”. Such a dichotomy separates the good from life as such, subverting the objective standard of value and thus opposing reason and reality itself.
If a system produces good outcomes, this means it has practical elements that produce it. When talking of humans and human systems where the practical is the moral, if an individual or a system produces good outcomes, this means it has moral elements that produce it. By the nature of immorality, it is the case that the individual or the system that produces good outcomes produces them not essentially because of every element working together, moral or immoral, but due to the moral elements and despite the immoral elements.
If the standard of value, i.e. life, is the standard based on the nature of our existence (in some sense), then should natural facts decide our values? Firstly, note that fundamental to our nature as human beings is our volitional faculty; to decide our values based on natural facts merely on the grounds that they are natural (i.e. pre-existing and/or with precedent in nature) is a denial of our volitional faculty. Values are decided not by whether something is “natural” (i.e. pre-existing and/or with precedent in nature) but by whether something is valuable to our existence as such; nothing in the mere fact of being “natural” makes something inherently valuable. Indeed, by experience, not everything natural, i.e. pre-existing and/or automatic, is valuable to our life; consider things like emotionalism, rejection of abstract thought, conventionalism, etc.
In short, life, truth, value and flourishing are not guaranteed by nature. Rather, we must discover what these mean by discovering how the facts confronting us relate to our choice to exist. In my view, nature-worship is immoral, since it neglects the fact that human values are not automatic, i.e. not guaranteed by nature, and must be created and/or maintained through acts of volition. Furthermore, regarding nature as the standard of good is a mistake, since the only valid standard of good is the choice to exist. Nature represents the facts of reality independent of our consciousness, but it is up to us to deal with these facts consciously and purposefully for our own ends.
To be a volitional being to the fullest is equivalent to being a rational being to the fullest. Why? Reason is the use of volition from the perceptual level (the last inexorably non-volitional stage of cognition) to focus based on (1) awareness of motives and (2) awareness of facts. It is the faculty that is based on, relies on and most uses the faculty of volition. To have as a fundamental approach either impulsivity or instinctiveness is to not exercise your volition in favour of automatic, subconscious or unconscious drives.
Thus, to be volitional to the full is to be rational to the full.
Exercising volition is, of course, not automatic and is often difficult or even taxing, especially with regards to the potential (i.e. the long-range). It may be tempting to wish for a metaphysically simpler life such as that of an animal. But we are what we are (as volitional beings) and can be nothing else, fundamentally. If we were not as we are, we would not exist, i.e. there would be no “us”.
Thus, to wish for a non-volitional form of existence in any way is ultimately (if not immediately) to be indifferent to our existence or wish for our non-existence, i.e. to wish for nothing; it is, in essence, nihilistic. Volition and our struggle to use it is not a curse but, essentially, the gift of existence itself and is the source and standard of our values. The form of existence of an animal or a plant is and can be nothing to us, and ours is — objectively — the highest form of existence we can value; it would be, in fact, the destruction of values to try to keep the standard of value as anything less.
NOTE: I am not saying that the existence of an animal or plant has no value to us, only that they cannot be the standard of value and are necessarily lower values than our own existence.